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GE CIO Jamie Miller: IT Heroes Wanted

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A finance domain expert by training, General Electric’s Jamie Miller has worked hard to transform IT since becoming senior vice president and CIO in 2013. Today, she’s upgrading GE’s IT capabilities and leveraging them to amplify business strategy.

As a large-enterprise CIO, you may be called upon to upgrade long-neglected IT infrastructure and platforms, drive process automation on the factory floor, or revamp the IT operating model in response to a change in business strategy. But you are far less likely to oversee all of those efforts simultaneously, and on a massive, global scale—unless, of course, you are Jamie Miller, senior vice president and CIO for General Electric (GE).

Miller addressed a group of aspiring CIOs at Deloitte University in June on how to effectively deliver value in such a complex and challenging role. Under Miller’s leadership, GE’s IT function currently supports over 300,000 employees working in 175 countries. (GE ranks No. 8 on the Fortune 500, with 2014 revenues of $149 billion.) Perhaps even more significant, Miller’s tenure as CIO—she was appointed in March 2013 after five years in GE Finance—coincides with a dramatic shift in the company’s overarching business strategy, away from financial services and toward inventing the next industrial era (a return to its roots). Most of the strategic initiatives she currently leads—related to GE’s mobile and cloud transformation, intense focus on data and analytics, and “Brilliant Factories,” for example—are in service of that shift in strategy.

Her calm demeanor and cool delivery defy the magnitude and complexity of her role. Far from being daunted, Miller states with conviction that there has never been a better time to be in IT and to be a CIO. “CIOs today can define how business gets done by setting the vision, leading the transformation, and driving growth and innovation. We can be heroes—at a time when the world needs more heroes.”

On Leading From Your Domain

Having honed her career in technical accounting, Miller readily acknowledges she knew little about IT before assuming the CIO role, but is a quick study with a huge bias for action. Today, she is “leading from her domain” to elevate IT within GE as a function that drives real business impact. In addition to finance, Miller’s strengths include her deep knowledge of GE’s businesses and products, and her relationships with business leaders and the finance community.

So, on the one hand, Miller is reducing operating costs by systematically closing data centers, migrating to the cloud, decommissioning apps, drastically reducing ERP systems (GE now has 160 in service, down from 584), and more. She is also using her formidable financial prowess with GE’s business leaders to illustrate the need to invest in IT. “Position IT as a function that amplifies the business strategy, explain how to invest for ROI, and funding will follow,” Miller advises.

On Remixing Sourcing

Until recently, GE’s Corporate IT team oversaw cyber security, new technologies, and employee experience, infrastructure, and global systems like finance and HR, with control for the rest left up to each business.

But that approach is changing along with GE’s portfolio mix, which, while still diverse, increasingly comprises businesses that all have much in common at their core: They are long-cycle businesses that encompass selling and servicing large industrial equipment.

From an IT perspective, effectively and efficiently servicing this portfolio will require some “remixing” in sourcing, with an explicit preference for insourcing, following Miller’s realization that excessive reliance on outsourcing had undermined IT’s importance and diminished the IT capabilities upon which GE’s future depends. Additionally, GE will be leveraging the similarities across its businesses to develop centrally, and then push out enterprisewide the IT vision, best practices, and the like that serve each part while also strengthening the whole.

Bringing along businesses that may be reluctant to make the requisite investments in IT takes a carrot-and-stick approach. “When we had problems, our contractors sometimes knew more than we did,” she says. “We cannot live that way. Our businesses need to invest in developing great IT talent. We need deep technical domain, and we’ll get it, in part, by making it cost-neutral to the businesses.” To that end, they are now hiring experts with skills in key areas such as data and analytics, cloud, mobility, cyber security, and software and manufacturing technologies, as well as investing in development programs to create the next generation of contemporary IT leaders.

On Inventing the Future

In the earliest days of her tenure, Miller met with all her key internal stakeholders, including the CEOs and CIOs of every business and certain operations leaders. She also went outside GE, meeting with peer CIOs and with venture capital firms and software companies in Silicon Valley. Only then did she and her team craft a strategy, which they now regularly communicate to her organization.

These days, Miller is focused on honing the delivery mechanism—on monitoring and maintaining applications and infrastructure, DevOps (facilitated by the move to cloud), and network strategy (compelled by cyber considerations).

Business leaders are noticing the changes taking place in GE IT. “They feel the movement,” says Miller. “They see investments in data, cloud, and employee experience. They see more IT talent in GE’s DNA. They see an organization that’s more outcomes-driven.” Meanwhile, GE’s cloud strategy, data-as-a-service approach, and Brilliant Factory, among other initiatives, are attracting external attention to GE as an IT innovator.

And a new phrase is creeping into the vernacular at GE: Start small, but start now.

GE CIO Jamie Miller: IT Heroes Wanted

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